Send an MP3 — but bounce a WAV

All DAWs these days can bounce (export) a bunch of different file formats. So what kind of files should you export and send to the people you’re working with?

I always send MP3s. They sound great these days (as long as you make them at 320 kbps), and the smaller files are so much easier to deal with than WAVs. You can attach them to emails, shoot them around over text messages, download them quickly over poor connections — they’re much friendlier. WAVs are clunky.

But: I always bounce my mixes and masters as full-resolution WAVs — typically 24 bits at whatever the session’s native sample rate is. So if the session is 48kHz, I do the bounce at 24_48. And then I convert that to a 320 kbps MP3 to send to the client.

Why do I take this extra step? Because these WAVs save my ass all of the time.

I don’t know if you’re like this, but sometimes I get super fixated on a few details in a mix, and I’m too close to it, and I go back a couple days later and end up “correcting” some stuff that didn’t actually need correcting. And I finesse all of the magic right out of my mix!

And I can not TELL you what a relief it is to be able to listen a couple revisions back, realize that the mix from a few days ago was way better — and I already have a high-resolution WAV of it. No more work necessary! It’s already done!

Yeah, I know that you can go back to a previous version of the session file. But especially these days with all the analog-emulation plugins and virtual synths and whatnot, sometimes even if you go back to the backup session file, it just doesn’t sound quite the same. Or maybe it does, but for reasons of superstition and overfocus not unrelated to the tweakhead mentality that made me over-correct the mix in the first place, sometimes I feel like I can’t be 100% sure that the new bounce sounds the exact same as the one I loved. Another reason that having that WAV is a lifesaver.

Building in failsafes — jamie